Road - road/trackway, Timahoe, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Roads & Tracks
At the southern edge of Drumachon, a small patch of firm ground rises slightly above the surrounding expanse of Timahoe bog in County Kildare. On that island of pasture, two ancient trackways once radiated outward from a children's burial ground, one heading south-south-west towards the bog, the other running west. What survives of them is fragmentary, and easy to miss entirely.
The better-preserved of the two trackways is roughly three metres wide and defined on each side by a narrow, shallow fosse, a type of drainage or boundary ditch, each no more than a metre across and barely twenty centimetres deep at most. Only about twenty metres of it remain traceable, leading away from the children's burial ground in the direction of the bog some two hundred metres to the south. Children's burial grounds, known in Irish as cilliní, were informal sites used from the medieval period well into the nineteenth century for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground. Their locations were often deliberate and liminal, placed at boundaries, beside water, or at the margins of settled land, which makes the proximity of bog here feel entirely in keeping. The second trackway, heading westward from the same burial ground, was still noted in 1986, but has since become impossible to identify on the ground. The area has been heavily disturbed by livestock, whose constant movement across soft ground obscures and compresses whatever slight earthwork once remained.
The site sits on level pasture and the physical traces are subtle enough that casual observation would reveal little. The poaching of the ground by grazing animals has further reduced what was already a poorly preserved feature, and any visit would require careful attention to the landscape rather than any obvious monument to read.